The invasion of reality television programs on the world-wide popular cultural
scene is the logical fulfillment of processes of globalization with which international communication scholars have long been preoccupied. Indeed, the
fact that the genre’s attraction is predicated on its successful adaptation of
global formats to local environments makes it the perfect exemplar of twentyfirst-century transnational capitalism at its best – in all its glocalized, deterritorialized, indigenized and disjunctive messiness. As such, reality television texts
provide a particularly fruitful terrain on which to explore transnational dynamics
in relationship to various local environments and advance our understanding
of the local “as the space where global forces become recognizable in form and
practice as they are enmeshed in local human subjectivity and social agency.”1

Employing the case of the adaptation of the Endemol Star Academy format to
the French environment – the first in a series of such adaptations that would
eventually spread through fifty nations – as a specific example, this essay proposes to tease out some of the “global-local articulations”2 of reality television.
Understanding Star Academy as a propositional text – i.e. as a text that is generating claims about the world – this analysis is particularly concerned with the
implicitly propositional statements3 the show is making about the local in relationship to the broad concept of “the global,” as well as to other local environments. This concern leads to a set of more specific questions this work attempts
to address: how and where do claims about the local and the global intersect in
the text? In what ways do such claims relate to the format of reality television?
What are the translocal dynamics at work in the text’s engagement with the
global? How are participants (and, by extension, viewers) positioned within the
global environment?

But before these can be addressed, Star Academy’s impressive success must be
placed within the broader context of reality television’s recent explosion.

The context of reality TV

The product of a combination of deregulation policies, an increased fragmentation of television audiences, efforts on the part of traditional networks to reclaim

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